Earlier this week, Kevin McCarthy did something that makes me a good bit happier to have him as my representative, and it has nothing to do with any bill he voted for or against.
I’m not sure how many of you have heard of a website balled Breitbart. It’s a conservative news/blog site, sort of like a not-liberal version of the Huffington Post. (Side note: remember when Arianna Huffington was conservative?) Founder Andrew Breitbart died a few years back, but the site has lived on, and in fact, it recently launched a California edition. It launched with such contributing writers as Tom McClintock, Tim Donnelly, Neel Kashkari, and, perhaps the crown jewel, McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives.
But the site also launched with a Photoshopped depiction of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on all fours in a bikini with her tongue hanging out, among other controversial images.
So McCarthy and his team asked that his column be removed.
“We didn’t condone them,” Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, told the Los Angeles Times in reference to the website’s pictures. “We thought it was the right thing to do to ask for the column to be removed.”
Of course, the Democratic National Committee made sure to criticize the images as “demeaning and sexist,” while Breitbart representatives’ defense has centered around the fact that many on the left do the exact same thing to Republican women on a regular and consistent basis.
On that one point, Breitbart is absolutely right, and it gets under my skin like few other things in politics. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the progressive party of women, for women, and all about women’s rights, or so we’re supposed to believe, but the attacks on Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and others are some of the most misogynistic things I’ve ever come across. Women are allowed to choose what they want, so long as it aligns with what the male leaders of the Democratic Party want. Those who choose to stay at home with the children, choose to oppose abortion, etc. are ridiculed, if not blatantly sexualized and objectified for a cheap laugh. Maybe it’s not just Republicans who are running a so-called “war on women.”
With all that being said, rather than getting down in the muck too, I would rather see sites like Breitbart take the high road. Be better than this. We can debate ideas, positions, policies, and so on all day long, and that’s fine. There are plenty of reasons to hate Obama that have noting to do with his skin color. There are plenty of reasons to oppose Pelosi without having to treat her like a sex object. There are plenty of reasons to oppose Palin and Bachmann without having to turn them into sex objects.
I’m quite glad that McCarthy has chosen to take the high road here by disassociating himself with Breitbart’s site. If more politicians and writers from the left and from the right would do the same, maybe we could actually get some things done for the good of the country — and maybe we really could have true equality of the sexes.